Page 1147 – Christianity Today (2024)

I can barely remember the dreaded phone call. Most of us know deep down that this kind of call will come at some point—likely in the middle of the night—and our lives will be changed forever. Mine came in the middle of a 17-day trip overseas.

It was my first international trip for work, visiting schools and churches in China, Kenya, and Uganda. I was both nervous and excited. My dad commended it as a career opportunity, while my mom was more apprehensive.

I had my own worries about them both—Dad in and out of the ER in recent months, Mom with symptoms of undiagnosed dementia. It was enough for me to tell them outright before I left: “Do not have a major crisis and do not die while I’m away.” It was a real concern, but an impossible request. My dad said, “I’ll try.” My mom replied, “Who do you think I am, God?”

So I was off, a haze of marathon flights, airport lounges, and Ebola health checks on days we travelled and packed days with inspiring people of faith when we arrived. I met first-generation Christians in China and talked with teachers working in impoverished slums in Kenya. During the last leg of our trip, a Ugandan boy whispered to me, “Jesus saved my life.” It had been a lot to take in: the travel, the cultural adjustments, the people, and the great need I saw all over.

As my colleagues debriefed one night, my boss took a phone call. I thought he was chatting with his wife. But then he waved me over. At first I didn’t take him seriously, but next he said all I needed to know: “Amy, it’s your sister.” That was it. I immediately predicted why she called—my dad had died. Everything went numb.

My sister later told me I replied, “Thank you for the information,” and hung up. I was in shock. I thought my weekly encounters with pain and sorrow through years of hospice work had prepared me for the death of my parents. I was wrong.

Lessons from Hospice

We’re never truly ready for a loved one’s death or last days, but barely any of us even try to be. Our culture lacks the real, meaningful conversations we need to have about death. We change the subject and avert our view to avoid facing it. Our elderly are warehoused in institutions and out of sight.

Our lack of context for suffering and death makes hospice a jarring place, filled with fear and distress. Spiritual care during this time takes on extra urgency. Leading a volunteer program at our local hospice organization, I pray with patients, listen to them, and camp out in the Scripture. I labor with people toward death.

I’ve sat with men and women as they’ve taken their last breaths; one passed while I sang the fifth verse of “Amazing Grace.” During a 4 a.m. death vigil, when the end is imminent, I’ve been lulled to sleep by oxygen machines, only to be jolted awake by the “death rattle”—the sound of fluids in the throat when a person is no longer able to swallow—or their last gasps for breath.

There are no strangers in hospice. I’ve held hands, kept secrets, digested the most painful stories, and grieved alongside moms, dads, sisters, sons, daughters, and best friends. I once stood holding hands with a large African American family around a hospital bed after their matriarch passed away. I prayed out loud as they wept and shouted “amen” after each string of words. Their mother had been sick for some time, but the finality of death brought about deep, new grief.

But despite our bonds in the halls of hospice, none of these people were my loved ones, my family. The bravado I felt facing my parents’ death dissipated with that single phone call. My head was guarded; my heart was not.

The Weight of Grief

Seconds after the call, my colleague, Kerry, followed me back to my room to pack. I rebuffed offers of prayer. I sat in the dark trying to manage the shock. The thought, “I’ll never measure up now,” crept through my heart—something I thought I resolved years ago. That was another dynamic I observed at hospice that now played out in my own family. For relationships marked by profound brokenness, death magnifies a lack of resolution.

That night, grief laid heavy on my body. My joints ached, and I struggled with shortness of breath. As much as I tried to be at peace—Psalms playing on my iPhone, prayer coming from my lips—the comfort of God escaped me. I felt bereft and utterly alone.

I chose to accompany my colleagues to a school the morning after my father died. The lesson for the day focused on pain and death. A young girl cried out that she and her mother did not have enough to eat, and it made her afraid. I cried and felt her fear as my own as I watched the teacher sow Jesus into this girl’s pain.

On the way to the airport and through each leg of the trip, friends replied to a plea for prayer I sent to several of them on Facebook.

Picture us holding your hands in prayer during this difficult journey.

You’re almost home, brave friend.

Woke up at 2 a.m. praying for you.

May you feel the presence of the saints and of the Holy Sprit as you grieve.

God is full of grace for you. He is holding you, loving you.

So many people are praying. We are bringing you home!

Eventually, I arrived back in the states, my luggage bursting with dirty clothes and bulky souvenirs: satin embroidered shirts, carved elephants, a drum. I was sleep deprived, overwhelmed, and breaking out in a rash. And my dad was gone.

Ministry of Presence

My hospice ministry is centered on presence and time. These are perhaps the most significant gifts we can offer in our busy world.

Following my dad’s death, I felt as though I failed to connect with my faith in the midst of a significant trial. But amid my pain and grief and failure, my friends lent their faith to me. They provided a ministry of presence and strength that carried me through the darkness and thousands of miles.

I think of Ecclesiastes 4:9-12:

Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! Again, if two lie together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him—a threefold cord is not quickly broken. (ESV)

From Uganda to now, in the weeks after my dad’s funeral, the Lord has been close to me, and my friends have been there to remind me of that reality. They were a cord not broken.

I’m often asked what kind of death is most difficult on loved ones—when goodbye extends over a long period or when a person dies suddenly. I try not to weigh or scale the suffering. Death is shocking and ridden with sorrow, no matter how and when it comes. My family is still reeling from my father’s death.

But as I emerge from the fog of the past several weeks, as I return to sitting and talking and praying with hospice patients again, I know more intimately the pain of grief. But more importantly, I know a God who stays with us through this pain, a God who himself operates through a ministry of presence.

Amy Tracy is a blogger, author, and writer in global missions at David C Cook. She lives in community with her much loved Colorado family—two best friends, four kids, four dogs, four hamsters, three horses, a cat, and a big floppy eared bunny named Gus. She can be reached on Twitter at @TheRealAmyTracy.

The following is an edited transcript from the Summer 2011 editorial meeting of the Shadow Government of Religious Publishing, known in the industry as ShGoRP. The acronym rhymes with “corp.” as in “corporation,” which is probably just an accident.

Executive 1: “We’re in a crisis. Numbers are down. Bart Ehrman isn’t going to make back his advance. Dan Brown-style conspiracy has run its course.”

Executive 2: “What about Americanized Eastern religion? We can always go back to that well. Wayne Dyer, peace be upon him, is still on PBS.”

Executive 3: “Okay, but we need a fresh angle.”

Exec 2: “We need to make it practical. I’ve always felt like we aren’t connected enough to real life. Diet books and couples yoga books, that’s all we’ve really had. And if we hit something practical, like marriage … don’t forget, rich people who buy books are usually married.”

Exec 1: “Good point. Let’s work that marriage angle. Do we have anything in the pipeline?”

Exec 2: “I had a proposal last month from an assistant prof at UCSD, a feminist who is fighting porn culture. She pitched a self-help marriage book that uses the Four Noble Truths to teach resistance to desire, even in marriage. She was inspired by Gandhi’s celibate marriage and the way in which he used to lie with naked young girls trying to exercise self-control by not getting aroused. She has her husband ogle her nude body and resist arousal. They also commit to total silence every other month in an effort to resist the desire to communicate.”

Executive 3: “Interesting, but it won’t sell. We need something pro-sex and pro-communication. And we need the veneer of Eastern religion but not the substance. Something that sounds Eastern, but isn’t.”

Executive 2: “And it’s got to be practical. The polls are telling us we are perceived as too esoteric and too out of touch, not practical enough.”

Minion tentatively takes a stab: “Evangelicals. They love practical. They love sex.”

Executive 3: “Not our market, and I highly doubt they ‘love sex’. I know you’re just an intern, but you should’ve had a trigger-warning inserted into the pre-meeting memo before you mentioned evangelicals. God, the fact you brought them up is not just naïve, it’s microaggression.”

Executive 1, gently: “It’s not her fault we bought their publishing houses. And those people do buy books. And their sex books really ship.”

Minion takes the lifeline from Exec 1 and puts all her chips on the table: “Sure. And look at what they buy.” Pulls up charts on iPad. “Apart from the sex manuals and a shocking number of Greek grammars and Bible dictionaries, these people buy touchy-feely. They read Amish romances by the buggy-load. They love experiential, emotional material, straight from Jesus, if they can get it, like Sarah Young. They love practical. Just look at Osteen.”

Exec 2: “I feel like Osteen’s positivity, his practicality, and his emphasis on karma is basically right, but he’s just so … baptisty. Not at all exotic or mysterious. We can’t market that, not until he has a nervous breakdown, converts to Judaism, or has a mid-life branding crisis.”

Exec 1: “Anybody got another name?”

Minion: “I think I know just the guy. [Name redacted from transcript.] I call him an ‘evogelical.’ He’s evolving away from being evangelical, but still kinda sounds like one.

Exec 2: “You know, that might work. A friend of mine went on a surf retreat he led. You get some Bible but it comes as practical, inspirational ideas rather than commands. There’s some spirituality there that we can label “theology” in promotional literature to max distribution. He kinda looks evangelical, but he’s cool with gay marriage.”

Minion: “Right! When he talks about ‘truth and grace,’ he’s not talking about the truth of God’s holiness or commands or anything. For [name redacted], truth is the truth about you and the grace you need to be yourself. He takes a few good, helpful bits out of the Bible so that you don’t have to read it or meditate on it yourself. He’ll cite James 4:6, ‘God gives grace to the humble,’ but he keeps it ‘horizontal’—you don’t have to be humble ‘vertically’ before God in prayer or repentance or submission, and you won’t have to reject Satan or sin. You don’t have to worry about how your ‘horizontal’ problems with people might be connected to a ‘vertical’ problem with God.”

Exec 2: “Just a guess, but an educated one: his discussion questions section won’t ask you to pray or read the Bible for yourself, but they will help you get in touch with your needs and feelings and they will help you put the relationship first above everything else.”

Exec 3: “Also, he won’t talk about the cross, or sin, or the idea that marriage represents Jesus and his bride or God and Israel. So he’s not a Bible Christian, but really a Christian, then. Our new kind of Christian. Our evogelical.”

Exec 2: “Exactly. I’ve been thinking for years he should write an autobiography titled, ‘Finally Christian.’ But no chance we get him. He’s busy selling those surf retreats.”

Exec 1: “Don’t worry, we’ve got influence.” Jots down a note: “Call Oprah.”

Audio from conference call including Acquisitions Editor, Marketing Executive, Junior Publisher, and the Author (RB). Underlined phrases and sentences are ideas found in The Zimzum of Love or its promotional material.

Junior Publisher: “Our team is surprised it took you a year to come up with a first draft for something this short, but I’m glad we’re underway.”

Acquisitions Editor: “I love the way you start the book with one individual—at first, it’s just you—and then another individual, each their own center of gravity. You’re making a subtle, profound statement—we don’t have to start with God, or community. There’s no external center of gravity. Just inviolable, independent individuals, two independent atoms who start to revolve around the relationship in a new center of gravity, just the two of them. Before, it was just you. Now, there are two.”

Marketing Editor: “When I was an intern we had someone try to start a marriage book with God’s design and plan for the world—you know, Genesis, male-female complementarity, that sort of thing. We talked him off that ledge. Other religious people were talking about what we owe God and how we revolve around him, not ourselves. We tried to get world religions involved but they kept talking about community and marriage. We couldn’t market any of that.”

AE: “Anyway, you’re doing well. But we need a gimmick, a hook that jumps off the bookstore rack. Something Eastern-sounding. Remember, you’re touring with Deepak now.”

RB: “Okay. Let me dig through some esoterica and get back with you.” RB scribbles a note to himself: “A word that sounds Eastern?”

Months later, another conference call, same participants:

JP: “Rob, I’ve been worried. Normally these books take six weeks to write—a few lovely stories, basic relationship principles, etc.”

RB: “I’ve got stories. But now I’ve got something else, that magic gimmick-hook thing. Tsimtsum.”

ME: “Dimsum?”

JP: “Sounds like a stretch, Rob.”

RB: “No, Tsimtsum.”

ME: “I hear it now. Eastern religion. Ancient flavoring. I love it. Tell me more.”

RB: “It’s Jewish, in fact, and only a few hundred years old, not ancient. When God wanted to create the world, God had to contract. God pulls away from the world to create room for something other than God to exist and thrive.”

ME: “Um, before we get specific let’s firm up the brand. The ancient Hebrew concept of Tsimtsum.’ Sounds trustworthy. Has an ad fontes sheen. Sells much better than ‘post-medieval’ or ‘early modern.'”

RB: “Okay. We can freshen it up as ‘Zimzum.’ And you can use it as a verb.”

ME: “‘An ancient new way of understanding marriage.’ That’s the subtitle.”

JP: “But let’s slow down, because I’m getting stuck here. What does zimzum have to do with marriage?”

RE: “Well, we create space. Like God.”

AE: “Like deism? You pull away from the person to save the relationship? Brilliant. Codependency seems like a limited audience, but maybe there’s hidden gold there. I know I always need some space from my partner. That’s why I volunteered to edit the collected works of Jacob Neusner.”

RB: “No, it’s not deism … see, there’s this space between you and your partner, and energy flows in this space. It’s like creation: God zimzums, creating and making space in love for something Other. ‘Tsimtsum’ means to “unleash energy and create space for someone to thrive while they’re doing the same for you, unleashing energy and generating the flow that is the lifeblood of marriage.”

ME: “I’m confused. Are you making space and contracting, or are you moving forward with energy?

AE: “And is zimzum a place or an abstract concept? Or is it a verb? Or is this just a metaphor?”

RB: “Actually, it’s Kabbalah.”

ME: “Don’t tell people that. Madonna cornered Kabbalah. And she’s lame. Please continue.”

RB: “As you intentionally create space for this person in your life and they create space in their life for you, this movement creates space between you—space that has an energetic flow to it … like an energy field or an electric current. We zimzum this Space that is responsive, sacred, dynamic, and it contains a flow of energy where we become quantumly entangled with one another. The energy field is at the heart of marriage. You can learn about, label, and impact this flow of energy. Marriage is awesome because the upside is infinite.”

JP: “Rob, we’ll read over the full draft and call you back in 30 minutes.”

24 minutes later, the call resumes.

AE: “Rob, you know I love you, and I think our relationship is strong enough to withstand a negative energy flow. I don’t understand what marriage has to do with the theory that God created the world by moving away from it.”

RB: “Maybe you should read it again.”

JP: “Rob, I love deism. I love Eastern religion. But I feel like we’re trying to do too much here. We’re mixing Eastern all-encompassing energy forces with deism, where God is off the clock and we don’t live and move and have our being in him.”

RB: “Look, we loved this word zimzum. Maybe we are bending and stretching this word, making it our own. But Oprah, Brian McLaren, and Deepak have all signed off on it, so we’ve got the top of the industry on board. Nadia Bolz-Weber is going to video herself getting a tattoo that says Zimzum, so we’re grassroots, too. Zimzum is unstoppable. I suggest you join in. Zimzum! Unleash energy and create space that didn’t exist before, generating the lifeblood of marriage and creativity, or in this case, publishing and creativity.”

ME: “Okay, sounds good.”

AE: “We’ll go with zimzum. The upside is infinite. And I like the way it can be used for any relationship, not just marriage.”

RB: “Anything else?”

AE: “Of course. I just want to affirm you’re going the right direction. I see great stories even a critic will appreciate. You have helpful advice about expectations and communication you’d get in any decent book on marriage. You’ve freshened up the old, tired “love bank” idea by making it about Energy and Flow and Zimzum. I see your usual great pacing, even if it sometimes sounds like you’re grasping for coffee-cup sleeve slogans.”

ME: “I’m seeing subtle but big successes in every chapter. You tell stories about your marriage that are amazing exercises in self-marketing—you seem to be talking about conflict but you never let yourself look nasty. And your wife never comes close to looking bad, which is so important on the Oprah Winfrey Network and Oprah’s tours. On every page I see great branding, great re-packaging. ‘Relationship’ is such a boring, overused word. You’ve done away with relationship and started talking instead about this Energy, this Zimzum, this Space that only the two of you share.”

JP: “Also there’s nothing about holiness—you use ‘sacred,’ which is so much fresher than “holy.” And you use it in a fresh way. It’s not a person or a body or marriage as an institution that’s sacred. Instead, it’s the zimzum energy field between us—sex itself, for instance—that’s sacred.”

AE: “You bring Christian ideas like ‘leave and cleave‘ or sacrifice as part of love without any embarrassing theology to give those concepts definition. Honestly, our other marriage experts cannot say what you said about sex, because you have these awesome Christian ideas from which to draw. But at the same time, you leave out vows and covenants and divine design, in favor of autonomy. I like the flexibility here.”

ME: “Yes, it’s flexible. It’s about marriage, but it’s not about marriage, and you talk about how Zimzum is always a risk and Zimzuming may not work for everybody. It was even a risk for God. We don’t know how anything is going to turn out. I hear you. You get married, work in publishing for a decade, and you think maybe Nietzsche was right. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that this book is going to work for everybody, Rob.”

RB: “I appreciate the editorial energy flow Zimzuming to me right now.”

AE: “Let’s keep that flowing. Remember, the flow goes both directions: we need revisions by June.”

RB: “Gotcha. We’ll talk soon.”

JP: “Farewell, Rob Bell.”

Jason Hood is the author of Imitating God in Christ: Recapturing a Biblical Pattern (InterVarsity Academic). With his wife, Emily, and their four children, he lives in Moshi, Tanzania, where he pastors St. Margaret’s Anglican Church, an English-speaking international congregation, and serves as a theological resource for the Kilimanjaro Diocese.

Copyright © 2014 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.

I watched as a single line spread across yet another pregnancy test. In that moment of silence and disappointment, that pink line felt more like a billboard with neon flashing lights declaring: “No! No! No!”

“No, you can’t be a mother.”

“No, your dreams can’t come true.”

“No, you don’t get to end this waiting game that is slowly shredding your heart.”

When my husband and I married, we believed, like most young couples, that starting a family would be easy. After all, we knew how it worked and God would surely answer our prayers because what we longed for was a good thing. But after years of those single pink lines, endless trips to the doctor, and one baby in heaven, we realized our journey was going to look different than we hoped.

As time went by, God began healing my heart and showing me that my idea of motherhood had been limited. He led me to Genesis where Eve is called “the mother of all living.” I came to see all women are mothers because we all bring life to the world in some way. After that realization, several different people prayed over me on different occasions and said God would bring life through my words. I began to get the picture: I was a word mama. I settled into birthing books and felt a new fullness deep within.

I came to see all women are mothers because we all bring life to the world in some way.

But one night I watched a television special on foster kids who age out of the system and unexpected tears began to slip down my cheeks. This is not okay, I thought. These kids can’t spend the rest of their lives without parents. In case you aren’t familiar with the system, when foster kids turn 18 they’re simply sent out into the world as adults. I kept asking myself: Who will help them learn to be grown-ups? Who will walk them down the aisle on their wedding days? Who will be grandparents to their babies?

Sharing God-Sized Dreams

My husband and I had considered adopting a baby, but we never felt that was the direction God had for us. But after that night of unexpected tears, I started running around and saying something crazy: “If we ever adopt, our kid will be a 20-year-old.” Try that and see the confused looks you get! Eventually a friend of mine responded, “Have you heard of Saving Grace? It’s a new transitional-living home being built in our area for girls age 17–25 who don’t have a family.” I got the contact information for Becky Shaffer, the director, and a few weeks later I found myself having a conversation with her in the middle of a living room still under renovation.

Becky shared her God-sized dream for Saving Grace, and I shared my twisty-turny journey of infertility. I dared to whisper my desire to possibly adopt an older child, and she didn’t look at me like I’d lost my mind. Instead she smiled and nodded.

As it often happens, soon after our meeting life got busy for both of us. I got a three-book contract with a publisher. Becky opened the doors of Saving Grace and welcomed in young women. We kept in touch and tried to find a way for me to be more involved, but it never seemed to work out.

Then last fall Becky invited me to a banquet celebrating the accomplishments of the girls at Saving Grace. God had just put on my heart that my word for the year was to be “love.” That night, I met my future daughter. Her name was Lovelle.

Lovelle received a copy of one of my books that evening and texted me a few days later to tell me how much it helped her. I wrote back and we began connecting. Eventually we decided to have lunch at Saving Grace. That day Lovelle asked if I had kids, and I gave her the short and sweet version of our story. When I got up to leave, she said, “You can be my adopted mom.” I always thought I might adopt . . . I’d never dreamed someone might adopt me.

Lovelle's New Family

Over the next few months, Lovelle began spending more time with me and my husband. She ate dinner at our house. We cheered her on at the finish line of a half-marathon. We introduced her to our families. At first she wasn’t sure what to think because of all she’d experienced. Here’s how Lovelle describes her past and how meeting me and Mark began to change her future:

I always thought I might adopt . . . I’d never dreamed someone might adopt me.

“I come from poverty. I lived in a home where abuse was a norm. My home wasn’t safe. Walking through the doors caused fear and anguish. I wasn’t a daughter—I was a tool. I was there when they needed me, and never for anything good. I was made up of what I thought were many bad and useless pieces.

“As a child I had lived in several different foster homes. I was never told I was wanted, loved, or cherished, but I was reminded I was dumb, worthless, and incapable. I remember praying to God and asking for help. There were so many ‘pieces’ to my life that I hated and despised. I was told he could fix it. I thought if I prayed hard he might.

“As I moved from place to place, the pieces of my life were a constant reminder I was alone and parentless in a cold world. As hard as I tried to stay positive, the whole ‘Daughter of Christ’ motto just didn’t make me feel better. I still felt there was a piece of my heart missing. I remember so many nights I would cry myself to sleep.

“Then God brought Mark and Holley into my life, and I slowly began to feel safe. It was through them that I felt loved and cherished. As they continued loving me, God began to reveal more of his purpose to the pieces that made up my life. I realized God was there in the pain and anguish. His purpose is to use those pieces to help so many others.”

The Next Chapter

In August, Lovelle officially changed her name to Lovelle Ellen Gerth. Earlier this summer when my grandpa passed away, she came to Texas with us for the funeral. We gave her a family Bible and prayed a blessing over her, passing on the spiritual legacy we’ve been given. In every way, she is ours. And in every way, God has filled the hole in our hearts to overflowing.

Yes, babies need parents. But so do 20-year-old young women. What many people don’t realize is you can adopt anyone of any age, and adopting an adult, whether through a formal adoption or a name change, is actually much simpler than adopting a minor.

I’d do it all again to get to our girl. Every single second. Every single heartache. Every single pink line on a pregnancy test.

Lovelle adds so much to our lives, and we love seeing her step into all God has for her. She is a strong, beautiful, courageous, godly young woman with a huge heart and a smile that lights up the room. Right now she’s finishing college and working at DaySpring, the same place I began my career as a writer. (It turns out she loves to speak, write, and encourage women like her mama too. I’ve got a feeling God has a lot ahead for us together.) Lovelle is also getting married in January to David, a great guy God chose just for her, so we get to add a “son” to our family as well.

I think back to those years of struggling with infertility, and here’s what I know is true: I’d do it all again to get to our girl. Every single second. Every single heartache. Every single pink line on a pregnancy test. Those lines don’t seem like neon billboards saying, “No!” anymore. Instead they seem like lines in a divine drama exclaiming, “Yes!” all along.

And with God as the author of our family story, the best is yet to be.

Holley Gerth is a best-selling author of several books, including You’re Going to Be Okay and What Your Heart Needs for the Hard Days. You can connect with Holley at HolleyGerth.com.

Lovelle Ellen Gerth is a marketing assistant for (in)courage.me, which is owned by DaySpring. She’s also a full-time student, fiancé, and a girl with big dreams.

Lovelle and Holley speak together and share their story. If you’re interested in finding out more, you can contact Holley through HolleyGerth.com.

Five months ago, the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) forced out one of the world's leading Christian publishers over a book it didn't actually publish.

WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group had published David Platt's Radical, John Piper's Desiring God, and Stephen Arterburn's Every Man's Battle. But then Convergent, a sister imprint which shared its staff, published God and the Gay Christian, a book arguing that same-gender sex is not sinful.

NRB president Jerry Johnson argued that NRB members cannot produce "unbiblical material, regardless of the label under which they do it," and asked Multnomah to "reconsider and end the practice of having Christian workers from their publishing house work on Convergent projects." Multnomah declined, and resigned its NRB membership in May rather than submit to an ethics review. [CT reported the debate in its July/August issue.]

But today the parent company of Multnomah and Convergent, Crown Publishing Group, announced a "transformative moment" that basically does what the NRB had requested.

In a reorganization conceived during the five months since the NRB dustup, Crown is separating the location and leadership of the imprints. Convergent will be moving out of the Colorado Springs office, where it shared resources and employees with Multnomah, and into the New York City offices, according to Crown's senior vice president, Tina Constable.

Publishing veteran Steve Cobb, who currently leads both imprints, will retire in March. Alexander Field, publisher at David C. Cook, will take over WaterBrook Multnomah and seek to "build upon [its] rich history in the evangelical space.” Convergent, which focuses on books for “progressive and mainline Christians who demand an open, inclusive, and culturally engaged exploration of faith," will be led by David Kopp. (The release notes that Cobb's retirement was first raised 18 months ago, prior to the NRB controversy.)

In May, longtime WaterBrook Multnomah author Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, told CT that he believed Multnomah was "in serious danger of crashing its brand in terms of evangelical trust," and was "quite certain that a host of evangelical authors share this deep concern."

Johnson wrote in May that the NRB and Multnomah both "expressed a desire to revisit the issue of their membership if they separate the staff of WaterBrook Multnomah from the work of Convergent in the future."

Crown, the Christian publishing arm of Penguin Random House, has worked to “develop a strategic vision for each of our imprints that will position us to even better compete with the top Christian publishers in the market today,” Constable wrote in today's announcement. “Ours is the only such program in trade publishing with dedicated imprints to serve every major Christian tradition. … Religious publishing is a core business for us—and one that we are strongly invested in growing.”

The company has worked to establish a "clearly defined editorial mission for each of our religious imprints," she said. WaterBrook “seeks books for an evangelical Christian that draw on experiential learning, story, self-help, and inspiration to help readers flourish in their faith.” Multnomah seeks to “advance the mission of the church” by looking for “life-changing culture-defining messages from a conservative Christian perspective.”

Convergent will operate as “distinctive yet complementary” to WaterBrook and Multnomah, and will focus on “the interests of progressive Christians who are redefining their faith through the prism of contemporary experience.”

Image, the publisher’s Catholic imprint, will remain unchanged, she said. [A fuller description of the four imprints' editorial missions is at bottom.]

Cobb joined Crown in 1996 as a founding executive of WaterBrook, and played a leading role in the 2006 acquisition of Multnomah. He founded Convergent in 2012 after "recognizing that a growing segment of the consumer marketplace was underserved by mainline evangelical publishing," wrote Crown president and publisher Maya Mavjee in a letter to staff.

Cobb has "overseen the acquisition and publication of innumerable important, and bestselling, books by such noteworthy authors as Kay Arthur, Liz Curtis Higgs, Stephen Arterburn, Joanna Weaver, Shaunti Feldhahn, Kerry and Chris Shook, David Platt, Randy Alcorn, David Gregory, Shannon Ethridge, Steven Furtick, Andy Stanley, Francine Rivers, Cindy Woodsmall, Joshua Harris, Nick Vujicic, Mary Neal, and Bruce Wilkinson, to name just a few,” she wrote.

CT noted how secular companies have owned Christian subsidiaries for years (see chart above) in exploring the question: What makes a company "Christian?"

CT has also explored the best practices of bestsellers, reviewed Convergent’s God and the Gay Christian, and noted the life and death of one of WaterBrook Multnomah’s authors: Brennan Manning and his Ragamuffin Gospel.

Here are the mission statements of Crown's religious imprints, per Constable's announcement:

WaterBrook is committed to creating content that both intensifies and satisfies readers’ elemental hunger for a deeper relationship with God. It seeks books for an evangelical Christian that draw on experiential learning, story, self-help, and inspiration to help readers flourish in their faith.

Multnomah is committed to advancing the mission of the church in proclaiming and living the gospel around the world. It looks for life-changing culture-defining messages from a conservative Christian perspective that challenge, educate, and inspire readers to their fullest potential.

Convergent Books is focused on the interests of progressive Christians who are redefining their faith through the prism of contemporary experience and has a mission that is distinctive yet complementary to WaterBrook and Multnomah. In the months ahead, we will be looking to grow Convergent as a home for leading author voices who can reach a broad audience with faith-informed content in categories ranging from spiritual practice and social issues to pop culture, humor, sports, and memoir.

Image, the only trade-publishing imprint that is focused exclusively on Catholic topics, founded in 1954 with the mandate of providing quality religious titles to readers at an affordable price, has a uniquely rich history of publishing-leading and classic Catholic-interest authors.

For Christians in the Middle East, 2014 has been a catastrophe. The most wrenching stories have come from Iraq, where the nascent Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL in news reports) has savagely persecuted ancient Christian communities, including Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Syrian Orthodox. Iraqi Christians have declined rapidly in number since the first Gulf War in 1991, but survivors long believed they could maintain a foothold around Mosul.

This past summer, that hope collapsed. In a ghastly reminder of Nazi savagery against Jews, Christian homes were marked with the Arabic letter ن for Nazarenes—Christ followers—or R for Rwafidh, a term for Protestants, and inhabitants were targets for abuse or murder. Islamist militants have controlled Mosul since June 10. Even if the total extermination of each and every believer is not the goal, those ancient communities and churches face the prospect of utter ruin. To that extent, the end of Christianity in Iraq is within sight.

The current battles are part of a lengthy story. Islam gained power over the Middle East in the seventh century, but it was several centuries before Muslims became an overwhelming majority. Christians operated under Muslims’ political rule, but the Coptic Patriarchate of Alexandria, Egypt, and the Baghdad-based Church of the East remained mighty forces of global Christianity. They retained that position for more than 500 years. Not until the 14th century did persecution become systematic and violent.

Long after that date, though, minorities survived and even thrived in substantial numbers. As recently as 1914, Christians still made up 10 percent of the whole region from Egypt to Persia (Iran), and most large cities were homes to multiple faiths and denominations. That did not mean that the Ottoman rulers were tolerant in principle; rather, they accepted what seemed like the natural order of things.

Disappearing Faith

Matters changed swiftly during World War I. Massacres and expulsions all but removed the once very large Armenian and Greek communities in Anatolia (now Turkey). Counting Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks together, murder and starvation killed more than two million Christians between 1915 and 1922.

Emerging Arab nations also targeted Christians. Iraq’s slaughter of Assyrians in 1933 gave lawyer Raphael Lemkin a basis upon which he defined the concept of genocide. The partition of Palestine and subsequent crises in the region massively shrunk other ancient Christian groups. The modern story of the Christian Middle East is one of contraction and collapse.

By the end of the past century, Christianity in the Middle East had two great centers: Coptic Egypt, and the closely interrelated lands of Syria and Lebanon. They are now home to many refugee churches.

Today, Syria’s continuing civil war threatens to extend Islamist power still further. Islamic State flags have appeared in Lebanon. Lebanese politician Walid Jumblatt has warned that both Christians and his own Druze people stand “on the edge of extinction.”

How bad could this get? All local Christians know the answer. They look back at the experience of Jews, who flourished across the region just a century ago but have now vanished from virtually every Mideast nation outside Israel. Since 1950, Egypt’s Jewish population has shrunk from 100,000 to perhaps 50; Iraq’s, from 90,000 to a mere handful. Christian Aleppo or Damascus could easily go the way of Jewish Baghdad. In 2013, Iraq’s Chaldean (Eastern-rite Catholic) patriarch Raphael Sako warned, “If emigration continues, God forbid, there will be no more Christians in the Middle East.”

The only Christian community that seems secure is the Copts, perhaps eight million strong, and a solid majority in some of Egypt’s southern districts. Even so, after the crisis there of the past two years, the potential remains for imminent civil conflict and Islamist violence.

Killing Churches

If the vision of a Christian-free Middle East is too pessimistic, the scale of the disasters that have overtaken some countries is beyond doubt. That experience offers many lessons for us in the West.

It is obscene to complain about a “war on Christmas” in the United States when there are Syrian cities without Christians to commemorate their holy days at all for the first time in some 1,900 years. That’s an authentic war on Christmas.

More broadly, these events teach us about the long-term trajectories of Christian history. They show how churches vanish and, more important perhaps, how they survive under the direst of circumstances.

One lesson emerges strongly: However often we talk of churches dying, they rarely do so without extraordinary external intervention. Churches don’t die because their congregations age, their pastors behave scandalously, the range of programs they offer wears thin, or their theology becomes muddled. Churches vanish when they are deliberately and efficiently killed by a determined foe.

That opponent looks different over time. The destructive enemy might represent a rival religious creed, as we now see with radical Islamism in Iraq. More commonly, the persecutor is inspired by a radical secular ideology that exalts the state and condemns any group that pledges loyalty to some other absolute, whether on earth or in heaven. That was the defining attitude of Soviet and Chinese communism. Similarly, the murderous Ottoman regime during the Great War acted as it did because of ferocious nationalism rather than any Islamic belief.

The Church of the East, the ancestor of the Assyrians and Chaldeans, perfectly illustrates that long survival—and profound current crisis. The disasters of the 14th century reduced that once transcontinental body to a much smaller remnant. That vestige continued within Iraq, Syria, and Anatolia for seven centuries. Throughout that latter period, hard-line Muslim jurists and demagogues competed to invent new humiliations to inflict on Christians: limits on what those believers could wear, the houses they could own, and the horses they could ride. At the worst of times, Christians wore rags to avoid giving any impression of wealth, which invited others to take their property.

If there was a single penalty that stung more than any, it was losing control of the soundscape. In a Muslim-ruled land, the only public voice of religion was the cry of the muezzin from the minaret; ringing church bells were utterly forbidden. The starkest division between Christian and Muslim societies was literally in the air.

But Christians endured century through century. They maintained their faithful witness while recognizing their severe limits. Through bitter experience, they learned to identify the irreducible core of their faith while setting aside additional practices. They abandoned the bells and whistles, literally. Christians could not evangelize, but they kept up the worship that stood at the heart of their spiritual life.

Critically too, they could support monasteries where spiritual warriors maintained prayer and study. As long as monks prayed and priests said the liturgy, the church was intact, and that situation could last, in theory, until Judgment Day. Surviving monasteries tended to be in remote and highly defensible places, and their fortifications were formidable. Egypt still has such legendary fortresses of prayer, such as St. Antony’s monastery and St. Catherine’s in Sinai. Until our own times, Iraqi Christians clustered around Mar Mattai (St. Matthew) and Rabban Hormizd, both dating from late Roman times.

Some believers hoped that powerful Western churches would send aid, although foreign Protestants in particular could rarely grasp the distinct patterns of local religious practice. Worse, Westerners aroused the suspicion of local nationalists.

No less dangerous was the temptation to support secular nationalist parties that promised to govern regardless of faith or denomination. Such alliances were always something of a trap, as they intertwined local churches with dubious regimes, most notoriously the Ba’athists of Iraq or Syria. At least for some years, though, these policies removed the danger of active persecution.

The church persisted stubbornly until modern times, when new militants emerged to tear it up, root and branch. Believers were killed en masse, leaving survivors to flee the country for a time or altogether. Only at that point did churches cease to function. That is what happened to the Armenians during the Great War, and has started to happen to Iraq’s Syriac Christians over the past two decades.

The Greater Plan?

In the darkest years of the Middle Ages, when European Christians fled from barbarian invaders, their obvious refuge was the neighboring monastery. This past summer, that was exactly the course taken by the Christians of northern Iraq to escape the Islamic State.

Some of the remnants of Mosul’s Christian community took shelter in the ancient cloisters of Mar Mattai. As the Islamic State has recently demonstrated, the practical logistics of destroying a church are not terribly difficult: You occupy a region militarily, and kill or expel all its inhabitants who practice the offending faith. Quite separate, though, is the question of how those persecuted believers understand that destruction.

Over the past thousand years, Christians have repeatedly had to ask: Why would God allow his followers to suffer defeat, subjection, exile, and enslavement? They find some answers in biblical precedent, looking to the Hebrew prophets who saw their own kingdom defeated for lacking faith and betraying the national covenant. Seen in this light, even the worst disasters can be seen as God’s scourge on his sinful people, although no clear evidence suggests that the churches in question are any worse than others that have enjoyed far greater success and safety.

But deeply embedded in Jewish and Christian thought is the idea of the righteous remnant, the community that survives tribulations only to follow God’s commands still more exactly. Perhaps the exile that initially seems a nightmare might form part of this greater plan, as dispossessed believers carry their witness to other lands. You cannot read the Bible without realizing how the Exile and Diaspora experience could powerfully spread faith into distant corners of the world. Around the Western world, growing communities of Christians from the Middle East are quite prepared to sing their song in a strange land.

Far more challenging is the question of why God would permit Christianity in a particular land to vanish altogether. Yes, churches move to new pastures where they might prosper. But what about their homelands? What about churches that are altogether destroyed, no remnant remaining? This theological dilemma might well be much discussed in 2015, when the long-awaited film version of Shusaku Endo’s 1966 novel, Silence, is set to release.

Endo was exploring the fate of the Catholic Church in 17th-century Japan as vicious persecution was snuffing it out. While the Catholic Church commemorates 200 named martyrs, tens of thousands more ordinary believers were beheaded, burned, and crucified. The Japanese used a singularly cruel tactic of water crucifixion at the seashore. Nailed to a cross at low tide, a priest would almost be wholly submerged as the tides came in over several days, finally drowning him.

As the last living priest in Silence muses over all the persecution and terror, he notes one fact: “In the face of this terrible and merciless sacrifice offered up to him, God has remained silent.” No, says the priest, God never intervened miraculously to protect his flock. No angels descended to conceal and protect fleeing victims; no persecutors were struck blind as they proclaimed their sentences or erected their crosses; the persecutors suffered neither plague nor military defeat as punishment for their actions. As in modern Iraq, the persecutors carried on their path unchecked until they achieved their monstrous goal.

Did God care so little for his faithful? Was there simply no God to care?

Eternal Timeframe

God may seem silent on occasion. At other times, people simply don’t trouble to hear his voice. Those previous cases of church extinctions are dreadful enough, but rarely are they as total as they initially appear. So much depends on our perception of time.

What to us may seem like a definitive act of annihilation seems quite different when located upon a divine timescale. As we are often told, extinction is forever; but humans should be very cautious about using the language of eternity. Forever changes.

As an example, we might look at the experience of China, which over the past two millennia has remained the world’s most populous nation. The story of Chinese Christianity is a recurrent cycle of mighty boom years followed by what seemed like total annihilation at the time, an obliteration so absolute that on each occasion, it was quite clear that the church could never rise again. That cycle has occurred five times to date since the ninth century. On each occasion, the Chinese church has reemerged far more powerful than at its previous peak. Each successive “nevermore” proved to be strictly temporary.

Of course, individuals and communities suffered horrifically during those intervening centuries of disaster. We can’t minimize the atrocities. But if communities perished, the church endured. Viewed in the timeframe of eternity, those years of seeming annihilation should more properly be understood as fallow times of gestation.

Even when institutional churches vanish, believers persist in many different forms. One of the most understudied facts in Christian history is that of crypto-believers, those hidden remnants who hold on to truth while superficially accepting the prevailing regime. As Anatoly Lunacharsky, the frustrated Soviet minister of education, complained in 1928, “Religion is like a nail: The harder you hit it, the deeper it goes into the wood.” Sometimes it goes in so deep, you can’t even see it.

In Japan, for instance, the brutal destruction of the Catholic Church described in Silence did not prevent large groups of Kakure Kirishitan (“Hidden Christians”) from maintaining the faith underground. In fact, some survived four centuries and a few elderly hang on today. We see the same phenomenon in China and, most relevant to this article, all across the Middle East. In Syria, estimates of the size of the Christian population before the present crisis commonly varied between 5 and 15 percent, with crypto-Christians accounting for much of the difference. Underground belief and practice will be much more difficult under an extreme Islamist regime than under the secular Ba’athists, but “cryptos” have often endured for astonishingly long periods, until gentler times return.

Shall we talk about the extinction of Middle Eastern Christianity? Come back in 500 years. We’ll see then.

Uncounted Christians

Even at this worst of times, Christians survive. But dare we say that, even in an increasingly intolerant Middle East, Christians as a whole are not just remaining but in places actually swelling in number?

This gets us into sensitive territory. Over the past decade, we have heard amazing claims about new Christian evangelization in Muslim countries, usually accompanied by incredible conversion statistics.

Having said that, some specific accounts are much more believable. David Garrison’s recent book, A Wind in the House of Islam, describes the Christian appeal in diverse Muslim societies. Remarkably, Syria offers some of the most convincing examples of this trend. Garrison is a responsible and critical reporter. The problem, though, is that all such activity is clandestine, for fear of arousing persecution.

For the sake of argument, let us adopt a sweeping skepticism and dismiss all such stories. Even so, we are still witnessing a striking upsurge of Christian numbers in some of the most unlikely settings, almost entirely as a result of immigration. Look at Saudi Arabia, a land of 28 million people where Islam is the only permitted religion. Consequently, official sources list the country as 100 percent Muslim.

In reality, Saudi Arabia is only one of many Middle Eastern countries that have imported millions of poor foreigners to perform menial jobs over the years. Many of those immigrants are African and Asian Christians, including many Filipinos. As they do not officially exist as Christians, they have zero right to practice their faith, even in private. But exist they do. By some estimates, Saudi Arabia’s Christian population is about 5 percent of the whole, perhaps 1.5 million people.

Other Gulf nations are more honest about just how religiously diverse they have become. Christians—mainly guest workers—probably make up 7 percent of the population of the United Arab Emirates, and 10 percent of Bahrain or Kuwait. Those are nations where Christianity scarcely existed 100 years ago.

No less surprising is Israel. Together with Palestine and the Occupied Territories, the State of Israel now includes thousands of adherents of ancient Christian denominations. Those older churches have fallen sharply in their numbers in the past half-century, but newer Christians have more than replaced them. There are thousands of Global South guest workers. Also, many Russian Christians invoked Jewish ancestry to enter Israel in the 1990s. Some were Orthodox Christians, others Baptists and Pentecostals. Israel’s Russian Christian community today is perhaps 80,000 strong.

Israel and Palestine combined have a population of some 10 million, of whom perhaps 5 percent are Christians—Arab, Armenian, Russian, African, and Filipino. Together with the Arab Gulf, these are the region’s new and growing centers of Christian belief and practice.

Suffering, Yes. Extinction, No.

Not for a second should such signs of growth distract our attention from the dreadful situation facing Christians elsewhere in the Middle East. Individuals are being murdered, raped, enslaved, and turned into refugees, and Western governments have no option but to intervene on their behalf—only how is a matter for debate.

Armed intervention might actually succeed in crushing the most aggressive jihadi campaigns. In the longer term, Western churches undoubtedly have their role to play in assisting fellow believers, whether in their homelands or in their new diasporas. Even with vigorous activism, though, whether military or humanitarian, it is difficult to imagine the churches of Syria and Iraq returning to the flourishing condition they enjoyed even half a century ago.

But that is quite different from saying that Christianity as such faces extinction in the region, or that the church might cease to exist.

Looking at this story, we might adapt the famous remark about Russia, typically attributed to Otto von Bismarck: “Christianity is never as strong as it appears; but nor is it ever as weak as it appears.” In God’s terms, words like strength and weakness can have surprising meanings. We must be very cautious indeed about making statements that claim to understand the goals or directions of history.

Philip Jenkins, author of The Lost History of Christianity (HarperOne), is distinguished professor of history at Baylor University.

I might as well admit my skeptical first impression: Poems That Make Grown Men Cry? What kind of a title is that? Is this a threatening poetry anthology? The compilation of a playground bully who at his advanced age should know better by now? Next I placed the title within the framework of crass marketing—title as provocation ("we dare you, all you men, not to cry!"), and fitting all too conveniently in the growing subgenre of male-oriented literature, which of course should not be confused with the euphemism "men's magazines." (See, for example, Manthology, an excellent poetry collection of a few years ago, or the more recent The Book of Men: Eighty Writers on How to Be a Man.)

Then I enjoyed a few fanciful moments thinking of what actually would make a grown man cry; I was pretty sure, for most men, it wouldn't be a poem. Maybe that palpable letdown and viewer melancholy some men feel in the moments after the Super Bowl, especially a disappointing one like this year's lopsided affair, when men realize a big part of their lives will be on hold for several months. Or the ruthlessly manipulative treacle of the film Marley & Me—God help you if it catches you unawares. (I speak from experience of an awkward night watching the telly in a B&B in the Lake District; I'd rather not talk any more about this.) Or maybe it takes a sentence such as this one: "Honey, I just wanted to let you know that our daughter's/son's junior-high variety show, which let me remind you we are attending tonight, promises to be extra long this year." (Or, as one friend, who shall remain anonymous, once told his spouse, "If you're bringing me to any more of these, you're getting me an iPhone.")

So thank you, catchy poem-anthology title, for sending my mind racing ahead in various directions. In fairness, though, the book's subtitle provides a simple explanation: "100 Men on the Words That Move Them." We have here a collection of poems that have proven particularly moving to at least one man in the world. That sounds more promising, since I regularly check out anthologies of all sorts in hopes of finding just such meaningful, memorable inclusions, whether something new to me or something familiar that may become freshly moving in a new context. If you have interests as a reader that in any way closely resemble mine, then you will likely find much that it enjoyable and rewarding in Poems That Make Grown Men Cry, even if you never quite manage to get over the slightly annoying title.

The editors of this collection are an English father-son literary team, Anthony and Ben Holden. Its origins reside in two visits over a weekend in the mid-1990s. As the father, Anthony Holden, explains in a preface, he visited a friend enduring a domestic crisis, who at one point attempted to recite Thomas Hardy's poem "The Darkling Thrush" but was unable to get through it without being overcome by emotion. The bird of the title enjoys "Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware." Shortly afterward, Holden met with the eminent literary scholar Frank Kermode and asked him, "Is there any poem you can't recite without choking up?" Kermode said immediately: "Go get the Larkin." For the next several weeks, Holden asked "every male literary friend" (why only men, I wonder) the same question posed to Kermode, and he was amazed how many said yes and how swiftly they did so. So that is how this anthology began, and it really is a worthy showcase of poetry's emotional powers and their effects upon us.

True to its origins, it is a very British collection: W. H. Auden appears five times (Rowan Williams chose "Friday's Child"), while Hardy, Larkin, and A. E. Housman make three appearances. (Seamus Heaney's preface for his selection of Hardy's "The Voice" offers a charming explanation: "I can't honestly say that I break down when I read "The Voice," but when I get to the last four lines the tear ducts do congest a bit.") Yet the collection overall is more diverse than this suggests: men of twenty nationalities chose works by poets from eighteen countries. Interestingly, only a dozen poems by women appear; maybe there's a "bro thing" when men are selecting poems that move them? I dunno. Three-quarters of the selections were written in the 20th century, and the topics range from love and mortality to the more expressly elegiac—losses of various sorts, personal tragedies, but also the loss of political ideals.

Approaching the topic more broadly, the son, Ben Holden, remarks that humans are the only species that cries, tears being, as Charles Darwin wrote, a "special expression of man's." For the younger Holden, tears reflect our vulnerability but also an openness, a capacity really to feel our experiences—and to feel compassion for the experience of others. (Amnesty International is a partner in this project.) "Let's celebrate high emotion!" he writes (perhaps a bit too sincerely). "However grievous the times, let these pages console you, if upset; lift you, if down; I defy you not to be inspired by them."

Poems associated with parental grief are some of the most tender to be found here, beginning with Ben Jonson's Renaissance masterpiece "On My First Son": "Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy; / My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy." I have long admired Jonson's fifth line, "O, could I lose all father now!" Here is grief raised to such a pitch that it risks breaking the bonds of grammar and articulation. My admiration doubles when I consider that Jonson was an exacting, proudly precise classicist writer, and so in one sense he had to write against his penchant for poise (captured well by this poem's smooth, spot-on couplets), and his own literary character, to arrive at that powerfully emotive, somewhat sorrow-clumsy or at least unusually worded line.

Three contributors discuss in their prefaces the loss of a child, and these framing passages are tender, too. The actor Chris Cooper recalls his son, Jesse, who died in 2005. Jesse was nonverbal, but, as Cooper recalls, was "always able to speak to my heart's core," and his selected poem by Rabindranath Tagore begins on a strikingly fitting note: "Those who are near me do not know that you are nearer to me than they are / Those who speak to me do not know that my heart is full with your unspoken words." Similarly, James McManus' preface feels both tearful and firm as he remembers his son, James, who died in a mental-health facility. His selection of the ending of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, whose final words loop back to the challenging work's opening, evokes the Irish author's daughter, Lucia, and her mental-health struggles, as well as that "eternal-return seam" that sends McManus to his "own dreams of hugging my son, moananoaning, so bad do I still want to save him, carry him along on my shoulders, begin again."

Terrance Hayes' selection of Gwendolyn Brooks' "The Mother," with its painful confrontation with abortion, brings to this anthology a description of a mother's grief, while Brian Patten's "Armada" presents an opposite perspective, a poet revisiting the loss of his mother. And for a lighter, maternal note, the popular filmmaker J. J. Abrams presents Billy Collins' "The Lanyard," where the modest summer-camp creation of a little boy is exchanged for a vast treasury of a mother's love and mothering efforts. A mother, the poem makes clear, welcomes such an exchange as perfectly even. It is a touching poem, but if you encounter it for the first time here, you will likely find yourself laughing aloud.

And then there's Sebastian Faulks' choice of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight," whose speaker offers a kind of contrast—a reflective, deeply hopeful parental point of view. Readers will do well to read Coleridge's poem with the briefer, more parentally circumspect poem that Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid presents, Robin Robertson's "Keys to the Doors." At first its speaker-father is able to explain solemnly to a young daughter the workings of things such as moon and stars, photographs, gravity. "In true life? you would say, looking up / and I would nod, like some broken-hearted sage, / knowing there would be no answers soon / to all the big questions that were left, to cruelty and fear, / to age and grief and death, and no words either."

A few poems here are classics whose presence seems inevitable: Cavafy's "Ithaka," for instance, or Auden's grand elegy for Yeats, introduced here by Salman Rushdie: "Follow, poet, follow right / To the bottom of the night, / With your unconstraining voice / Still persuade us to rejoice." And speaking of grand, what a delight to hear Whitman's full voice in Stephen Fry's choice, "Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances." Ezra Pound is a powerful presence here, too, in a selection from the Pisan Cantos: "What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee / What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage / Whose world or mine or theirs / or is it of one?"

In general, the presenters' short prefaces are forgettable, but not in every case. Tobias Wolff, presenting John M. Morris' "For Julia, in the Deep Water," explains that this poem takes him to that moment of "learning to stand back" as a child learns to swim, or takes the bus on the first day of school, or gets married. He recalls "that sense of my children needing help, needing me, that helplessness, that desolation of letting go, that joy in their courage, their hunger for all of life's possibilities and hazards." Joe Klein, journalist and author of the political novel Primary Colors, comments about Housman's "The Remorseful Day" becoming "a reminder of grief so pure that it can also cleanse."

A final, well-represented category comprises poems in honor of lost friends. Al Alvarez, in selecting John Berryman's "Dream Song 90: Op. post. no. 13," which focuses on the poet's friend and fellow writer Randall Jarrell, is taken back to his own Princeton days, when the critic R. P. Blackmur reigned, and when Alvarez "argued all night with Kenneth Burke." John Keats' sonnet "Bright Star" is the playwright Kenneth Lonergan's choice, not especially because a dead painter friend of his read it to him but "because of the miracle that enables another human being to carry me back in time and over the ocean with nothing more than a sequence of words."

This book does raise a few carps within me. Why is James Wright called "James Arlington Wright"? I have never seen him identified in this way. It had the effect of making me think I was about to read an obscure19th-century versifier, not the great Pulitzer Prize-winning poet of the American postwar. Another thing: the Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer supplies an afterword. That sounds promising, but it turns out to be rather like a punt job: after a brief opening paragraph in which she defends the small number of women poets by focusing instead on the poems' emotional force, which is beyond gender and historical era, she lists "a few of the poems that moved me most." Those entries typically feature some selected lines, and then a gnomic summary. The first, Wordsworth's "Surprised by Joy," earns the single sentence, or phrase, "The terrifying paradox of memory." Okey dokey, but it is not enough to justify inclusion in this anthology.

Then again, why focus on these small criticisms, when I did discover a poem that has proven deeply meaningful to me during the past few months? It was found during a summer when a good friend died from a heart attack. The poem is "For Andrew Wood," by the English poet James Fenton. David Remnick provides interesting background for his selection. He recalls how he caused himself a "foolish deprivation" by ceasing to attend poetry readings after attending them frequently when he was younger. Then, around 2000, he heard James Fenton read, or rather recite his poetry at Columbia University, where he "seemed to radiate that language, to exude it rather than read or perform it."

Most interestingly, Remnick then recalls attending Christopher Hitchens' memorial service in 2012. Many of those who were present shared ribald episodes or journalistic adventures. Then Fenton stepped to the microphone, "all business, but clearly shaken," Remnick remembers. This poem, "For Andrew Wood," was not written for Hitchens, "but it was revived and recited for him, the perfect lament for the lost friend." I am moved, paradoxically, by this recycling, which should seem distasteful or maybe a little rude—why not write a new elegy for Hitchens? Yet it speaks to the ways great poems outlive or continue to live beyond their first occasions, even the deeply personal occasion of an elegy written for a particular friend who died many years before. It is easy to imagine (or, if you prefer, search for it on YouTube) Fenton's poem hammering upon the hearts of Hitchens' mourners, no matter that it was not originally written for the one dead now. "For Andrew Wood" begins with an intense image of the dead, matched by an intense question for readers: "What would the dead want from us / Watching from their cave?" Two stanzas later, an answer is tentatively ventured: "I think the dead would want from us / To weep for what they have lost. / I think that our luck in continuing / Is what would affect them most."

As for the final stanza, well, judge it for yourself, readers:

And so the dead might cease to grieve
And we might make amends
And there might be a pact between
Dead friends and living friends.
What our dead friends would want from us
Would be such living friends.

"I couldn't be more grateful for a work of art," writes Remnick, and I sympathize with this reaction. Thus it seems myopic of me to focus on a few quibbles when such a poem of anguished but ennobling feeling has been discovered, during a season of grief of my own, much to my gratitude.

Brett Foster is associate professor of English at Wheaton College. His first book of poetry, The Garbage Eater, was published in 2011 by Northwestern University Press. A second collection, Fall Run Road, was awarded Finishing Line Press's 2011 Open Chapbook Prize, and appeared in 2012. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Anglican Theological Review, The New Criterion, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, and Yale Review.

Copyright © 2014 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.

Here’s a question I didn’t expect to hear so much when I moved to China: “Which do you prefer: McCain or Obama?”

It was the summer of 2008, and the Chinese were following the U.S. presidential election as closely as my husband and I were. I could barely keep their country’s leaders straight—given that they were all older, diminutive, bespectacled men who never smiled—but they were paying attention to ours. When the global economic downturn hit a few months later, the question became even more urgent. “Who will be better for China?” they wanted to know.

When I completed my overseas ballot and used the office fax machine to send it back to the U.S., my Chinese colleagues pounced. They wanted to know whom I had voted for and why. It was an uncomfortable moment for me, trying to so publicly explain what we often see as a private decision. But I was also impressed. Our Chinese friends did not have the same democratic process, but they certainly understood it.

On Election Day, I watched the returns in China while my husband was on a business trip to India. When the results were officially announced, he sent me a message over Skype. “Everyone here is crying,” he wrote. “They’re so happy Obama won.” In India, caste and skin color continue to be principal factors in determining an individual’s lifelong educational and economic opportunities (or lack thereof). Americans’ willingness to elect a black president 44 years after the end of segregation had given hope and joy to people half a world away.

During the years I spent living abroad, I saw this truth played out over and over again: the world watches how Americans vote. They know something that we rarely acknowledge and may not even be aware of. How we vote directly affects their lives, even if the nearest bit of American soil is more than 8,000 miles away.

This is no longer the world of our grandparents, when the boundaries between nations, cultures, and economic systems were more discretely defined. Today the American banks and investment firms that fail will bankrupt households in Europe and Asia. Today the illegal drugs that Americans crave have led to the rise of criminal gangs in Central America, whose terrifying violence has caused a refugee crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. Today an individual man, unaware of a virus in his bloodstream, can board a plane in Liberia and bring the Ebola crisis to the U.S. 24 hours later.

While this global interconnectedness may be something we are still trying to grapple with, people living in other countries already see how deeply linked we are. In the most remote villages in Sub-Saharan Africa, bottles of Coke and Pepsi are for sale. In movie theaters across the world, Hollywood blockbusters—sometimes subtitled, sometimes not—are playing. If you talk to individuals anywhere, they will likely have strong opinions about U.S. foreign policy and foreign aid, as well as the U.S. economy, our environmental impact, and the pervasiveness of our popular culture. How our country operates and the decisions our leaders make have significant ramifications, for better or worse, for the rest of the world. But the decisions that our leaders make always begin with the decisions that we as voters make at the ballot box.

My vote, then, is about far more than me, or my family, or my community even. Such is the privilege, responsibility, and power that we as Americans have. Our votes can affect how other people an ocean away live.

For those of us who follow Jesus, we have another big reason to take our voting responsibility seriously. The U.S. is still perceived as a Christian nation around the world. Within the church we may lament the secularization of our communities, but the reality is that 78 percent of Americans still profess to be Christian. Our political leaders invoke the name of God and no other. They very publicly attend church and court the religious vote.

How Americans vote, then, tells the rest of the world how Christians vote. It communicates what our values are. Will we vote out of fear or in favor of our wallets, as those who propagate negative political ads presume? Or will we vote for something greater, something bigger, something more Christ-like? Will we vote in a way that loves our neighbor as ourselves, that recognizes that the well-being of all of us who occupy this little planet are inextricably linked?

Like many Christians, I don’t always know how to live out my faith such that others will take notice. But the good news is that the simple act of voting in support of biblical values like compassion, justice, integrity, and generosity is in and of itself a powerful witness. It’s a witness that billions of people will see—and then experience through the policies and actions our government enacts. And it’s a witness that requires no more work than taking some time to read, think, pray, and fill in a few bubbles.

Though we aren’t electing a president this year, we are still electing more than one-third of our Senators and all of our Representatives. We’re electing 36 governors. There is no question that these individuals will influence policies that will ripple out around the globe. Your vote counts—for the sake of your neighbor, your brothers and sisters around the world, and the Kingdom.

Let’s vote like the world is watching.

Dorcas Cheng-Tozun is a writer, blogger, and editor who has found healing and hope through words. Previously she worked as a nonprofit and social enterprise professional in the U.S. and Asia. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and adorable hapa son. You can find her online at www.chengtozun.com or on Twitter @dorcas_ct.

Picture yourself at your next gathering of church leaders. As an icebreaker, the emcee asks everyone to turn to a neighbor and say what's going well in your ministry. With a smile, you turn to the person next to you and describe your excitement over the people from the neighborhood who've started attending the church.

Then the emcee says, "Now tell the person next to you what's keeping you up at night."

What would you say?

What would you think if your neighbor turned to you and said, "Nothing. I've got no worries"?

In a roomful of leaders, that would be pretty weird. We're not sure we'd believe such an answer.

Worry is everywhere. As I wrote in my book Anxious, "If you aren't worried, you are either (1) dead, (2) comatose, or (3) seriously out of step with our culture." The majority of Americans say they live under moderate to high stress levels. This constant stress has many consequences for our health, including high blood pressure, obesity, sleeplessness, fatigue, headaches, depression, and digestion problems.

The American Psychological Association indicates that more than half of Americans report stress-related health problems. In a 2010 survey, 40 percent of people said that in the past month, stress had caused them to overeat or eat unhealthy foods. Nearly one-third said they had skipped a meal because of stress, and more than 25 percent said they had been unable to sleep.

Worry is not only common—it's expected. As long as worry doesn't become "excessive" (a term with no clear definition) or interfere with productivity and social sparkle, it's widely considered a healthy sign of life and an indicator of engagement. After all, important and hard-working people have a lot to worry about. The good parents are the ones who care enough to worry over their kids. People who take life seriously are easily recognizable for their furrowed brows. Worry is fashionable, and we are suspicious of people who don't worry.

Leaders are certainly affected by this. We feel the weight of the world (or at least part of it) on our shoulders. We believe the hype about our own responsibilities. And we admit that we worry that if we don't seem worried, people will think we're not taking our job seriously. Or we're not doing anything important. Or we've lost our edge or our motivation or we just don't care.

But Christians, even Christian leaders, are called to live differently. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus told his listeners not to worry but to focus on God's priorities and trust God to provide what they needed: "Don't worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries. Today's trouble is enough for today" (Matt. 6:34). When he sent his disciples forth to do ministry (Matt. 10), he told them four times not to worry or be afraid. During his Last Supper before his trial and crucifixion (John 14), he twice told them not to be "troubled," using a word that is also translated elsewhere as "worried."

Paul wrote, "Don't worry about anything; instead, pray about everything" (Phil. 4:6-7). Peter instructed Christians to "give all your worries and cares to God, for he cares about you" (1 Peter 5:7). The fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22-23) describes a life in direct contrast to what worry produces.

Like other Christians, leaders are supposed to be people of peace, trust, faith, and joy. So why all the worry?

There are at least three big reasons we succumb to worry.

1. Our world is full of reasons to worry.Let's face it: there's a lot to worry about. From a purely human point of view, there are only two really good reasons not to worry: (1) it's bad for us and (2) it doesn't do any good. Those two reasons usually crumble under the avalanche of bad news that comes our way each day (each hour!). Never have we had more exposure to what is wrong with the human race and to the brokenness of our world.

In such a world, it makes perfect sense to worry—to be consumed by worry … unless a great, powerful, loving God is in control. Unless someone much wiser than us, unflustered and unthreatened, asks us to tuck ourselves under a sheltering wing and replace our worry with trust (Psalm 91).

2. Our culture pressures us to worry.Ever stop to think about who profits from our worry? The exaggerated fears based on urban legends, media sensationalism, and misinformation. Sometimes the things that scare us are manufactured or exaggerated by people who have something to gain from our worry—the more we worry, the more viewers they have, the more readers they win, the more people are interested in buying products or donating money to supposedly solve the problems they've got us so worried about. We wind up paying the price of worry (hurting ourselves and compromising our ability to live with purpose and intention) to profit someone else.

We also face peer pressure to worry. As the saying goes, misery loves company. Worried people want others to worry with them, and they mistrust people who keep their boats out of that current.

Bad things happen. People quit. Balls drop. Conflict erupts. In such a world, worry feels necessary. But we overlook another reality: God is at work even in worrisome situations.

If we don't give in, we are profoundly countercultural. And rowing against the flow can require tremendous energy. Sometimes it's easier to just give in and worry along with everyone else. Sometimes it's more comfortable not to question why we feel we should worry. So we ignore Jesus' call for a mindset different from that of people who do not believe (Luke 12:30-31).

3. We have an inflated sense of our own importance and control.Leaders often behave as if everything is up to us—because at least a part of us believes this is true. We believe no one else can do what we can do, no one has a better idea, everything will fall apart if our vigilance slips. We think it's up to us to solve every crisis, and we truly believe God needs us.

But God does not need us—although he graciously grants us a role in his grand redemption story if we will take it. Without us, the planets will not go off their orbits—they do not revolve around us.

Human beings have never had more resources at their disposal than now. We are accustomed to having solutions or knowing people who have the solutions, and we're extremely uncomfortable when faced with situations in which we are truly powerless. We feel we can and must do something, so we worry, because it feels like doing something. But it's actually doing nothing, cloaked in a destructive disguise. It's a gift from the one who comes to steal, kill, and destroy, and it has no part in the abundant life Jesus offers (John 10:10).

Let It Go

Worry is bad for leaders. It causes us to make bad decisions. It motivates us to focus on self-soothing rather than serving others. It stops us from taking risks we should take and from listening to the voice of the Holy Spirit. Worried people tend to take others down with them in the emotional spiral. This is leadership at its least effective.

Consider instead the influence of a leader who is at peace, able to face reality without quavering, firmly planted in faith, clear-headed, well-rested, courageous, and creative. A leader who works heartily and diligently and is content to let others carry what is theirs to carry and let God retain ownership of what belongs to him.

How can you be responsible for results (as leaders are) and not be worried? Accept what worry is: a waste. It doesn't help. Replace it with productive action, self-care, and wise thinking. Work well, invest in others, address problems when they arise, exercise the courage necessary to make the really hard decisions you're tempted instead to let fester while you worry over them. Then sleep at night, knowing you can't do more. Knowing that if failure comes, it will be honest failure.

When tempted to worry, respond with courage and purpose and productive action directed at the things that worry us which are within your control. Let go of what isn't. And above all, recognize the great power, wisdom, and dominion of the God we serve.

This truth about God himself is the real key to stop worrying. Brain scientists now tell us that our brains can be rewired by not only what we do, but what we believe. Our beliefs change our thoughts. And as cognitive-behavioral therapy and Scripture both tell us, our thoughts give birth to our actions. If we want to stop worrying, we must examine and change what we believe. ("Your Father already knows your needs." "For the Lord your God is with you wherever you go." "I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." "The Lord himself will fight for you.")

What do you believe about God's place among the things that keep you up at night?

Go ahead and face reality, ALL of reality.

Bad things do happen. This is reality. Even under the best of leadership, balls drop, people quit, conflict erupts in the worst possible ways, everyone fails, people point fingers, people go bankrupt, absolutely everyone dies. Worry feels necessary in such a world. In the face of such possibilities, it somehow feels wrong to be at peace, to walk away when we've done enough. But ironically, our worry cannot stop any of these things from happening. It could not be more unnecessary.

It overlooks another aspect of reality: God is at work, even in worrisome situations.

Faith, hope, trust—now these are necessary. And because of who God is, we can live in the space they create. Sleep well, Christian leader.

Amy Simpson is author of Anxious: Choosing Faith in a World of Worry (IVP, 2014). She also serves as senior editor of Leadership Journal.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Most pastors feel overworked. And if we are not careful, we can work so hard that we do not have time for our most important task: prayer and the ministry of the Word (Acts 6:4). We don't have time to study. We must make time to study. Here are seven pieces of practical advice for maximizing your study time (plus one bonus point).

Plan ahead: Your study time needs to be spent studying the text, not finding a text to study. So plan your preaching in advance. Planning ahead for a month or quarter or even a year will help you get down to business when it is time to prepare a message. The goal is to have a schedule that will enable you to make the most of your time in study.

Schedule study time: Your time of study is just as important as staff meetings, counseling sessions, and hospital visits. So begin each week by marking out the hours you will study each day. Determine how long it takes to prepare a message. Schedule it into your week. Then keep your appointments to study and write. Have the courage to tell people that you have something scheduled that you cannot cancel.

Some church members seem to think good sermons grow on trees.

Steal time: There will be weeks when your schedule is out of control. Stealing time is a good way to make up for the time you may lose to other things. I copy down the resources that I need from week to week and put them in a file. I take it wherever I go, and I steal back as much time as I can while I am waiting for an appointment, between meetings, or any other time I can take advantage of.

Study when it's time to study: You know how it goes. When you finally get to the study, you are blitzed by the temptation to do other things. Resist that temptation. When it's time to study, study. Don't web surf or answer emails or play with your smartphone or clean your desk. Put your butt in the seat. Get to work. Pray. Read. Study. Think. Write. Remind yourself that you will never get this week again.

Educate your people: Some church members seem to think good sermons grow on trees. You must educate them. Talk to your deacons, elders, staff, and members about your study process. If they understand what it takes for you to prepare, they will be more willing to help you.

Practice intentional neglect: Many urgent matters come across a pastor's desk each week. Much of it has nothing to do with prayer or the ministry of the Word. You must distinguish between what is urgent and what is truly important, and then learn to neglect some things during the week to prepare for Sunday.

Delegate: In order to practice intentional neglect, make sure the things that need to be covered are covered by someone. If you have staff to assist you, trust them to do so. If you have to recruit and train volunteers, do it. Determine the responsibilities that you can either give away or share. Then do it. And use the time you gain to work on your sermon for Sunday.

Do whatever it takes: Do whatever you have to do to be ready to preach the Word of God! Sermon preparation is spiritual warfare. The enemy would do anything to keep you from preparing the message God wants your people to hear. Fight! Pray hard. Get up early. Sacrifice a night of sleep. Drink a cup of coffee. Turn off the TV. Duck out of meetings. Do whatever it takes to get ready to preach.

H.B. Charles, JR. is pastor of Shiloh Metropolitan Church, Jacksonville, Florida.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.

Click the image for a full-size version